Bandwidth efficiency is one of the most important system performance factors for wireless communication systems. In packet based data communication, where the traffic has a bursty and irregular pattern, application payloads are typically of different sizes and with different quality of service (QoS) requirements. In order to accommodate different applications, a wireless communication system should be able to provide a high degree of flexibility. However, in order to support such flexibility, additional overhead is usually required. For example, in a wireless system based on the IEEE 802.16 standard (“WiMAX”), multiple packet streams are established for each mobile station to support different applications. At the medium access control (MAC) layer, each packet stream is mapped into a wireless connection. The MAC scheduler allocates wireless airlink resources to these connections. Special scheduling messages, DL-MAP and UL-MAP, are utilized to broadcast the scheduling decisions to the mobile stations.
In the MAP scheduling message defined by IEEE802.16, there is significant control overhead. For example, each connection is identified by a 16 bits connection ID (CID). The CID is included in the MAP message to identify the mobile station. The maximum number of connections that a system can support is therefore 65,536. Each mobile station has at least two management connections for control and management messages and a various number of traffic connections for application data traffic. As another example, each connection includes the identification of an airlink resource that can correspond to any time/frequency region that is allocated for communication. The resource allocation is identified in the time domain scale with a start symbol offset (8 bits) and a symbol length (7 bits) and in the frequency domain scale with a start logical subchannel offset (6 bits) and a number of allocated subchannels (6 bits). Due to the fact that different applications have different resource requirements, the allocated resource region is irregular from connection to connection. As a still further example, the modulation and coding scheme for each connection is identified by a 4-bit MCS code, identified as either a downlink interval usage code (DIUC) or an uplink interval usage code (UIUC). Another 2 bits are used to indicate the coding repetition in addition to 3 bits for power control. Overall, the overhead of a MAP message is 52 bits. For applications such as voice-over-IP (VoIP), the payload of an 8 Kbps voice codec is 20 bytes in every 20 ms. The overhead of the MAP message alone can therefore account for as much as 32.5% of the overall data communication, thereby resulting in a relatively low spectral efficiency. It would therefore be beneficial to reduce the overhead in a multi-carrier packet communication system to improve the spectral efficiency of the system.